Dreams of Eagles

“I think I'll tear your damn head off, boy.” Buford Sanders stood up; he was nearly as tall and wide as Jamie but had a huge belly. “I've killed men with my bare hands.”

Jamie smiled. “So have I, you puss-gutted, loudmouthed son of a bitch.”

The two men closed on each other.

Buford took a wild swing that would have taken Jamie's head off if it had connected. But Jamie had sidestepped quickly and popped the man on the mouth with a solid left and followed that with a hard right to the jaw. Sanders stood flatfooted for a moment—no one had ever hit him so hard in his entire miserable life. Jamie was pleased to see his opponent's confusion—he'd hated bullies since he was a child.

Buford rushed him, trying to get Jamie in a bear hug. Suddenly, Jamie jumped into the air and kicked out, the sole of his moccasin smashing into Buford's face. The force of the kick sent the loudmouthed bully-boy to the floor, blood dripping from nose and mouth. Men had come rushing into the bar to see the fight and stood smiling as Jamie MacCallister kicked the crap out of the man who had beaten and terrorized so many of them.

Jamie battered the man with terrible punishing blows to the face and belly. Finally, he finished him off with a right-handed blow that broke bones. Buford Sanders toppled over, landing on the floor with a mighty crash. He did not move.

Jamie MacCallister had hardly worked up a decent sweat.

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Copyright © 1994 William W Johnstone

 

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ISBN: 978-0-7860-3752-0

 

Somebody said that it couldn't be done.
But he with a chuckle replied
That maybe it couldn't, but he would be one
Who wouldn't say so till he'd tried.

—
Edgar Albert Guest

 

 

I slept and dreamed that life was beauty.
I woke—and found that life was duty.

—
Ellen Sturgis Hooper

In the late summer of 1837, Jamie Ian MacCallister, one of only two survivors from the battle at the Alamo, his wife Kate, and a small group of friends had pushed deep into uncharted country that would someday be called Colorado. They kept on pushing until Jamie, who was scouting far ahead of the wagons, came to a long wide valley, a respectable creek running right down the middle of it; the valley nestled amid towering mountains. Jamie dismounted and jammed his hands into the earth. The earth was dark and rich. The pass he had used to enter the valley was wide and not likely to be blocked, at least for very long, by snow. The valley was lush with timber. Jamie rose, still holding the handfuls of rich earth and looked all around him. His long shoulder-length blonde hair fanned under the breath of wind. He nodded his head and put the earth into a cloth sack. Then he mounted and rode back to the wagons. He tossed the sack to the big man called the Swede.

“How about that, Swede?”

The man smelled the earth, then fingered it. He grinned. “It will grow good crops, Jamie.”

Jamie rode back to his wagon, driven by Kate. “We're almost home, Kate. Just a few more miles. It's beautiful, it's lovely, and it's lonely, but I think you'll like it.”

She smiled at him. “If you like it, I like it.”

A few miles further on, Jamie halted the small wagon train and pointed to the long valley. “Yonder she lies, people.”

The children piled out of the wagons and ran forward, the tall grass waist high on the youngest.

“Jamie, it's the most beautiful place I have ever seen!” Kate whispered.

“It's our home, Kate. We've come home at last.”

The journey of Jamie Ian MacCallister had been a torturous one even before he met and fell in love with Kate Olmstead when they were both just children back in Kentucky.

Born in the wilderness of western Ohio, Jamie had watched his parents and baby sister killed by rampaging Shawnee. The chief had taken Jamie prisoner and kept the boy until he was twelve, when Jamie and a young white woman named Hannah had escaped the village. Jamie's early years had been brutally hard, forcing the lad to grow up very quickly. He had been adopted by Tall Bull and Deer Woman and raised a Shawnee, learning the warrior's way while most white boys his age were learning their ABCs and playing marbles and mumbly-peg and hide and seek. At thirteen, Jamie was a grown man. His childhood had been virtually nonexistent. He was tall and broad-shouldered, tremendously powerful. He was lean of hip and strong of arm, his wrists larger than most men's forearms. He did not know his own strength. His eyes were blue and his hair was blonde, worn shoulder length. His face was tanned and rugged, the jaw square and slightly dimpled. Women considered Jamie handsome. Jamie never gave a thought to it one way or the other.

Jamie and Kate fell in love the moment their eyes touched. From that instant forward there would be no other woman for Jamie and no other man for Kate.

After Jamie's escape from the Shawnee town, a young childless couple, Sam and Sarah Montgomery, took Jamie in to raise as their own. But again, a chance for some vestiges of adolescence were denied Jamie, for there were those in the Kentucky village who considered Jamie more savage than civilized. Kate's father, Hart Olmstead, forbade his daughter to see Jamie and beat her savagely whenever he learned of their clandestine meetings.

At fourteen, Jamie was forced into a killing and had to flee into the wilderness, branded an outlaw and brigand. Shortly after that, Jamie returned to the Kentucky village for Kate and together they rode westward to start a new life. They were married in the town of New Madrid, Missouri, and pushed on. They settled in the wilds of east Texas, in an area known as the Big Thicket, and immediately started a family. And what a family it was! Before Jamie became involved in the Texas drive for independence from Mexico, he had fathered eight children, for twins and triplets ran strong on both sides of the family tree.

Moses Washington, an ex-slave who, with his wife, Liza, had escaped from slavery in Virginia and settled in the Big Thicket before Jamie and Kate arrived, summed it up this way: “Good God, boy! Are You and Kate tryin' to populate east Texas all by yourselves? Am I gonna have to put a bundlin' board between you two? Slow down!”

The Alamo slowed them down.

Sam and Sarah Montgomery and Swede and Hannah showed up in the Big Thicket country a couple of years before Jamie left to fight at the Alamo, and a small community was carved out of the wilderness.

Then Jamie was called to fight. Jamie Ian MacCallister was the last man to leave the Alamo, ordered out at the last possible moment by Colonels Travis and Bowie with a pouch of messages from the gallant defenders of that old church. He was ambushed along the way, first by Tall Bull, who had been looking for Man Who Is Not Afraid, Jamie's Shawnee name, and then shot out of the saddle by a Mexican patrol. He was left for dead in a ditch beside a rutted road. The last farewells from that proud garrison, that bastion of Texas freedom, lost for all time. He was found and taken in by a Mexican family.

When he finally recovered from his near-fatal wounds, Jamie felt the vastness of the west silently calling him. His grandfather was out there somewhere in the shining mountains, a mountain man. Jamie asked Kate if she would like to move west.

“I go where you go, love,” she replied.

Moses and Liza and their children, Sam and Sarah Montgomery, Swede and Hannah and their children, and Juan and Maria Nuñez and their children packed up and headed west with Jamie and Kate and their children. They would be settling a wild and often savage land, untamed, uncharted, free, and open. Soaring on the wings of eagles. Dreaming the eagles' dreams.